[Remind-Fans] Terminal emulators (was Re: Remind 04.01.00 BETA 3 is available)

[Mathieu]

Hi,

I have been using `kitty` for a few years too and I liked it, but realized I was not really taking advantage of its special features (most of my machines don't have a dedicated GPU), and `kitty` cannot be set to *not* depend on the GPU, so in the end it turned out to be slower than other terminals on those machines. I still liked its other features, like the very efficient `icat` image protocol, built-in tabs, complete customization options, URL grabber, *etc.*, but I finally moved to Wayland a few weeks ago and figured it was a good opportunity to try something else (even though `kitty` is compatible with Wayland too).

I am now a happy user of [`foot`](https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot), which defines itself as a fast, lightweight and minimalistic terminal emulator. I have not done any measurements myself but there are [some](https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot/src/branch/master/doc/benchmark.md) that look good, and it does feel fast indeed. It is easily configured with a simple file that covers aesthetics, keybindings, and more advanced features like a scrollback search and a URL grabber (those latter two are handy because I use a terminal e-mail client; they're convenient for Remind too because I can search in its output without using a pager). It also supports sixel, font resizing, *etc.*, but one feature I really like is it has a server mode, whereby one process can be launched as a daemon and other windows can then be launched as clients within the same process, which makes them start even faster and use less memory because they share the same font cache (with some downsides: if the server crashes, all clients crash, or if one window is very busy, this may impact others). I typically autolaunch the daemon when I start Sway, and then use mostly clients.  

I have also been using `st` a little and keep it as a fallback terminal just in case, since it's very lightweight, but I didn't spend much time configuring it. On some machines still using Xorg, I also use `urxvt`, which turned out to be quite fast as well and is still actively maintained even if it's an oldie, with a server/client mode too, and it is quite customizable (extensions for URL grabbing, tabs, changing font size dynamically, fake transparency for those low spec machines that can't use a compositor).  

Terminal emulators are really a matter of personal taste anyway, but it's cool that we have so many options.

M

On 2022-09-23 08:25 Jochen Sprickerhof via Remind-fans <remind-fans at lists.skoll.ca> wrote:

> Hi Paul,
>  
> * Paul M. Foster via Remind-fans <remind-fans at lists.skoll.ca>
> [2022-09-22 23:14]:
>> For what it's worth, I run i3, and recently did a survey of the file
>> sizes of various terminal emulators.
>>  
>> xfce4-terminal: 387440 bytes terminology: 556184 bytes qterminal
>> (LXQt): 403600 bytes kitty: 14568 bytes
>  
> Note that kitty is written in Python so this table is not really
> meaningful. But then again you are also missing the shared libraries
> loaded by the other variants. To give you some idea of the file size
> (not sure if one can draw any conclusion out of it), I propose apt
> install on a minimal Debian unstable chroot:
>  
> $ apt install --no-install-recommends xfce4-terminal | grep
> "additional disk space" After this operation, 179 MB of additional
> disk space will be used.
>  
> xfce4-terminal 179 MB terminology 300 MB qterminal 272 MB kitty 63.8
> MB xterm 15.8 MB stterm 15.6 MB
>  
> with stterm being https://st.suckless.org/.
>  
> I would rather recommend looking at the memory usage when running the
> executable and for my Debian unstable test system I see (in top -e
> m):
>  
> VIRT    RES    SHR kitty   930.6m 103.3m  62.9m xterm    21.3m  11.0m
>   6.1m stterm   15.5m   8.5m   5.6m
>  
> I also recommend:
>  
> https://lwn.net/Articles/749992/ https://lwn.net/Articles/751763/
>  
> Note that stterm gained some speed improvements in the meantime and
> you can also hand tune it (if you really need) as I wrote down here:
>  
> https://lwn.net/Articles/752894/
>  
> Cheers Jochen
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